This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
J. R. Rivera began reading tarot and oracle cards at the age of thirteen, a starting point he has connected directly to what he describes as his first haunting premonition. That early experience, an intuitive sense of something coming before it arrived, became the thread he followed into a lifelong practice of card reading rather than a single youthful curiosity that faded with age.
The habit grew steadily rather than staying a private hobby. Over the years that followed, Rivera assembled a personal collection that has now grown past five hundred individual tarot and oracle decks, a scale that marks him as a serious collector as well as a working reader. Building a collection of that size across different decades and traditions of card design reflects a sustained engagement with the whole field of tarot rather than attachment to any single deck or system.
Rivera has described the collection itself as more than a hobby alongside his reading practice, each deck acquired over the following decades marking a further stage of a discipline that began with a single premonition at thirteen. That combination, an early personal premonition that became a lifelong discipline and a collection built one deck at a time over many years, forms the documented starting point outside sources give for Rivera's development as an American tarot reader, well before his own name later appeared on a deck of his own creation.